In a plenary address at the 2023 NCHC annual conference in Chicago, the former Vice Chair of the Norwegian Nobel Committee issued a challenge for honors students and educators to use their voices and positions of local leadership to promote peace. The call for peace advocacy extended in Chicago resonated with the large audience, as leadership…

Faculty and administrators often present risk-taking as something honors students must do, but rarely do they take risks themselves. In an ideal situation, communal risk-taking would subvert institutional power dynamics, free students from grade-associated anxiety, and enable them to build dynamic partnerships with faculty. This paper discusses…

Although a young program, the North Carolina A&T Honors Program illustrates how quickly and successfully honors can achieve its goals of providing a quality education to its high-achieving students, and how these students can benefit academically and personally from the experiences that honors provides for them. This article provides a brief…

I was tangentially aware of gifted education while I was in elementary and middle school, but my first real awareness of the concept came through my work in the University Honors Program at Texas A&M. In truth, I was not yet working for the University Honors Program; I was a graduate assistant for then-Associate Director, Finnie Coleman, who…

Traditionally, discussion about the value of honors education focuses on the outcomes for students: enhancement of skill sets that are (a) academic, (b) social, (c) leadership-oriented, (d) personal, and (e) vocational or professional. These are all real outcomes, but they can also be achieved outside honors. What makes honors special is that it…

LaGuardia Community College has a saying: Challenge expectations. As fitting as these words are in an essay on the unique value of an honors program at a community college, they also reflect the creation, growth, and ultimate goal of LaGuardia's Community College Honors Program and its students, faculty, and staff, who embody these words every…

The value that honors programs hold for universities lies in the tangibles. Honors programs help an institution pinpoint and cultivate the talents of its finest students. They help these students achieve undergraduate research and encourage them to seek further inquiry and creative endeavor. They provide the counsel, advising, and encouragement…

First-generation students sometimes lack a support network that values higher education. Stephen F. Austin State University (SFA)--a regional, comprehensive university of approximately 13,000 students, located in East Texas--serves a diverse body of students who are nearly 50% first-generation. These students often face financial constraints and…

Honors colleges and programs often evolve in response to a mandate from boards of regents or trustees. Such mandates can lead to new or accelerated change within the institution, change that in many cases is linked to and represented by honors. Such has been the case at Western Kentucky University (WKU), where the honors program has played a key…

In this article, the author explores the steep budget cuts in recent years, and how this has affected the number of honors students that can be served at community colleges in the United States. This was true in Spokane, Washington, where, prior to working with "American Honors," community colleges had struggled for many years to provide…

Established in 2013, American Honors (AH) is a program operated in partnership between the for-profit company Quad Learning and a growing number of public two-year colleges. It is designed to provide an honors curriculum and intensive wraparound advising for high-achieving, low-income domestic students, as well as for international students who…

An honors curriculum with realistic graduation requirements should have a respectable graduation rate. This number, when low, can indicate significant problems in the program. But a high graduation rate does not necessarily indicate success. A quality honors program, especially one that remains attentive to students' ability to thrive, might have…

Annmarie Guzy, an expert with almost three decades of experience in post-secondary honors education, responds to Jerry Herron's essay, "Notes toward an Excellent Marxist-Elitist Honors Admissions Policy," which argues that "a well-conceived admissions policy tells us much more than whom to recruit; it becomes the basis for a…

Honors students are, almost by definition, committed to excellence. As a result, they tend to be overextended (Guzy). They also "tend to be more eager, exploratory, and experienced than their non-honors counterparts" (Achterberg 77). They typically take a full load of coursework while at the same time juggling clubs, learning…

K-12 education has identified an important need for culturally relevant practices among underrepresented minority students in the classroom. Research has shown that minority students perform better in multicultural learning environments that place an emphasis on addressing both the student's social and academic needs. Accordingly, Central State…